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Those pioneering Bike Weeks seven decades ago bore little resemblance to today's crush of thundering Harleys and burly bikers who spend 10 days cruising around town and downing many bottles of beer and turkey legs.

But as the beards on a lot of those bikers get grayer, some local leaders worry the Bike Week of the future could dwindle to something much smaller and very different.

Others disagree that the event needs life support, and are confident today's young bikers will keep coming back to Daytona into their Geritol years.

Local officials are already working on ways to keep the event strong in the future, and aging bikers will be part of the equation.

"Generally speaking I think there's been an attrition of motorcyclists," said John Seibel, owner of the Thunder Gulch campground in Bunnell and someone who's worked around bikers for 20 years. "The Harley crowd is what makes up Bike Week, and that Harley crowd (in Daytona) is diminishing. I think for the future there'll be a diminishing of biker activity and coming to rallies."

When 59-year-old John Shephard of New Jersey wheeled his black 1999 Harley onto Beach Street Thursday night, he was stunned to find vendors setting up and pretty much nothing else going on.

"It seems like it's dead," Shephard, a Bike Week regular in years past who last visited in 2002, said as he looked around. "I had no problem getting a parking spot. Usually it was already kicking in by now."

Those who want to see Bike Week survive, and maybe even grow, are already strategizing to preserve the springtime biker party that draws hundreds of thousands of bikers who leave behind a lot of their dollars in local tills.

MORE COOPERATION, PROMOTION

Top officials at the Daytona Regional Chamber of Commerce have come to believe that simple communication among cities could go a long way toward helping Bike Week. The event has rippled out from its epicenter of Main Street over the years, and leaders throughout the area need to do a better job of talking to each other and coordinating, said Jim Cameron, the chamber's senior vice president of government relations.

The Daytona chamber only manages Bike Week for the city of Daytona Beach, so the organization has called Edgewater, Holly Hill and DeLand to talk about how the cities can work together, Cameron said. Other rallies have a centralized control structure, and in the future Daytona could become the core of a new regional structure, he said.

Something else Daytona Bike Week organizers are considering is something leaders of the nation's two other large motorcycle rallies already do. They go to the biggest biker events around the nation and promote themselves. Officials with the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally held in South Dakota each August and the Laconia Motorcycle Week held in New Hampshire in June every year will be hanging around Main Street this week to get bikers excited about their events.

Charlie St. Clair, executive director of the Laconia Motorcycle Week Association, arrived in Daytona Beach last week before the local event kicked off, and said he plans to stay until the last bike rolls out of town.

St. Clair said the nearly 90-year-old Laconia event peaked at about 450,000 in 2004, and then like other events lost visitors when the economy tanked. The crowds have slowly been returning to New Hampshire, he said, with 320,000 people visiting his event last year.

The Sturgis Motorcycle Rally peaked at 500,000 in 2005, dropped when the economy faltered and steadily built back up to 445,700 last year, according to a spokeswoman for the city of Sturgis. Sturgis makes a point to add events young riders like, such as X game type races, and also welcomes vendors targeting older riders with things such as pharmaceutical products, said the spokeswoman, Christina Steele.

St. Clair said he's been coming to Daytona Beach for Bike Week since the 1970s, and he doesn't think the event is at risk.

"As long as people ride motorcycles there'll be rallies," he said.

ALL THINGS TO ALL BIKERS

There's increasing discussion locally about attracting and taking care of the different groups that come for Bike Week. There's the core group of middle-aged riders who come back for familiar traditions, the older veterans who are migrating to three-wheeled bikes, younger bikers who are sometimes more interested in races at the Speedway than hanging out in bars, and female riders discovering the event.

Bike Week officials are talking about how to keep all of them happy, tossing around ideas for trike events for older bikers and staying hooked into social media for the 20-somethings.

'We're trying to come up with new activities for bikers we probably didn't do 20 years ago,' Cameron said.

With younger bikers in mind, Pete Scianablo, who co-owns Tombstone Silverworks on Main Street with his brother, is going high tech with two cameras on top of his building so he can live-stream what's happening in the heart of the party on his website, DaytonaBikeWeek.com.

Scianablo said he sees plenty of young bikers on Main Street, and he doesn't think they're losing interest. Motorcycle manufacturers are making sure of that by retooling their bikes to appeal to younger tastes, he said.

Mike Lazaro of Pittsburgh, a 24-year-old who's been coming to Bike Week since he was a teenager, said he has no plans to stop visiting Daytona Beach.

"There's a lot of fun stuff to do," said Lazaro, who was visiting the Harley-Davidson museum store on Beach Street one day last week.

"Anyone who thinks it's dying is not part of the event," Scianablo said.

CRACKDOWN, RECESSION HURT

There's no uniform agreement on exactly how many bikers are expected in Daytona this week, and how many have come in years past. Some insist the city has seen as many as 500,000 bikers the past few decades, but others say that's a wishful thought with no hard evidence to back it up.

"By no stretch of any imagination have we ever had 500,000 people here," said Evelyn Fine, president of Mid-Florida Marketing & Research Inc. in Daytona Beach. "I know because we've been tracking it for 34 years."

She estimates the event peaked at around 350,000 in the mid-1990s, and says the number has gone up and down since then.

Bikers spreading out over the years to new hangouts like Destination Daytona and New Smyrna Beach's Flagler Avenue might be what has some people thinking the number of riders is down. They could just be more scattered, some argue.

Many agree the ailing economy has kept a good number of bikers at home, and Fine's research into Daytona Beach area hotel occupancy during Bike Week shows visitors have been gradually coming back for Bike Week the past three years.

The number of bikers also dipped in the early 1990s when a crackdown on biker problems led to a boycott among riders who became convinced Daytona wasn't going to be friendly to them, Fine said.

"We had to work hard to get them back," Fine said. "This is a multimillion-dollar impact for this community, and jobs depend on it."

The city needs to make sure Bike Week remains a priority, she maintains.

"We can not take it for granted," she said.

Jeff Hentz, president and CEO of the Daytona Beach Area Convention and Visitors Bureau, said he and others will work to keep the event alive.

"I think it has a lot of shelf life," Hentz said. "My gut feeling is we're not even close to half way there."

<p>DAYTONA BEACH &mdash; When Bike Week was born in the late 1930s, it revolved around a three-mile race on the beachside that drew a smattering of onlookers. </p><p>Those pioneering Bike Weeks seven decades ago bore little resemblance to today's crush of thundering Harleys and burly bikers who spend 10 days cruising around town and downing many bottles of beer and turkey legs. </p><p>But as the beards on a lot of those bikers get grayer, some local leaders worry the Bike Week of the future could dwindle to something much smaller and very different. </p><p>Others disagree that the event needs life support, and are confident today's young bikers will keep coming back to Daytona into their Geritol years. </p><p>Local officials are already working on ways to keep the event strong in the future, and aging bikers will be part of the equation. </p><p>"Generally speaking I think there's been an attrition of motorcyclists," said John Seibel, owner of the Thunder Gulch campground in Bunnell and someone who's worked around bikers for 20 years. "The Harley crowd is what makes up Bike Week, and that Harley crowd (in Daytona) is diminishing. I think for the future there'll be a diminishing of biker activity and coming to rallies." </p><p>When 59-year-old John Shephard of New Jersey wheeled his black 1999 Harley onto Beach Street Thursday night, he was stunned to find vendors setting up and pretty much nothing else going on. </p><p>"It seems like it's dead," Shephard, a Bike Week regular in years past who last visited in 2002, said as he looked around. "I had no problem getting a parking spot. Usually it was already kicking in by now." </p><p>Those who want to see Bike Week survive, and maybe even grow, are already strategizing to preserve the springtime biker party that draws hundreds of thousands of bikers who leave behind a lot of their dollars in local tills.</p><p>MORE COOPERATION, PROMOTION </p><p>Top officials at the Daytona Regional Chamber of Commerce have come to believe that simple communication among cities could go a long way toward helping Bike Week. The event has rippled out from its epicenter of Main Street over the years, and leaders throughout the area need to do a better job of talking to each other and coordinating, said Jim Cameron, the chamber's senior vice president of government relations. </p><p>The Daytona chamber only manages Bike Week for the city of Daytona Beach, so the organization has called Edgewater, Holly Hill and DeLand to talk about how the cities can work together, Cameron said. Other rallies have a centralized control structure, and in the future Daytona could become the core of a new regional structure, he said. </p><p>Something else Daytona Bike Week organizers are considering is something leaders of the nation's two other large motorcycle rallies already do. They go to the biggest biker events around the nation and promote themselves. Officials with the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally held in South Dakota each August and the Laconia Motorcycle Week held in New Hampshire in June every year will be hanging around Main Street this week to get bikers excited about their events. </p><p>Charlie St. Clair, executive director of the Laconia Motorcycle Week Association, arrived in Daytona Beach last week before the local event kicked off, and said he plans to stay until the last bike rolls out of town. </p><p>St. Clair said the nearly 90-year-old Laconia event peaked at about 450,000 in 2004, and then like other events lost visitors when the economy tanked. The crowds have slowly been returning to New Hampshire, he said, with 320,000 people visiting his event last year. </p><p>The Sturgis Motorcycle Rally peaked at 500,000 in 2005, dropped when the economy faltered and steadily built back up to 445,700 last year, according to a spokeswoman for the city of Sturgis. Sturgis makes a point to add events young riders like, such as X game type races, and also welcomes vendors targeting older riders with things such as pharmaceutical products, said the spokeswoman, Christina Steele. </p><p>St. Clair said he's been coming to Daytona Beach for Bike Week since the 1970s, and he doesn't think the event is at risk. </p><p>"As long as people ride motorcycles there'll be rallies," he said.</p><p>ALL THINGS TO ALL BIKERS </p><p>There's increasing discussion locally about attracting and taking care of the different groups that come for Bike Week. There's the core group of middle-aged riders who come back for familiar traditions, the older veterans who are migrating to three-wheeled bikes, younger bikers who are sometimes more interested in races at the Speedway than hanging out in bars, and female riders discovering the event. </p><p>Bike Week officials are talking about how to keep all of them happy, tossing around ideas for trike events for older bikers and staying hooked into social media for the 20-somethings. </p><p>'We're trying to come up with new activities for bikers we probably didn't do 20 years ago,' Cameron said. </p><p>With younger bikers in mind, Pete Scianablo, who co-owns Tombstone Silverworks on Main Street with his brother, is going high tech with two cameras on top of his building so he can live-stream what's happening in the heart of the party on his website, DaytonaBikeWeek.com. </p><p>Scianablo said he sees plenty of young bikers on Main Street, and he doesn't think they're losing interest. Motorcycle manufacturers are making sure of that by retooling their bikes to appeal to younger tastes, he said. </p><p>Mike Lazaro of Pittsburgh, a 24-year-old who's been coming to Bike Week since he was a teenager, said he has no plans to stop visiting Daytona Beach. </p><p>"There's a lot of fun stuff to do," said Lazaro, who was visiting the Harley-Davidson museum store on Beach Street one day last week. </p><p>"Anyone who thinks it's dying is not part of the event," Scianablo said.</p><p>CRACKDOWN, RECESSION HURT </p><p>There's no uniform agreement on exactly how many bikers are expected in Daytona this week, and how many have come in years past. Some insist the city has seen as many as 500,000 bikers the past few decades, but others say that's a wishful thought with no hard evidence to back it up. </p><p>"By no stretch of any imagination have we ever had 500,000 people here," said Evelyn Fine, president of Mid-Florida Marketing & Research Inc. in Daytona Beach. "I know because we've been tracking it for 34 years." </p><p>She estimates the event peaked at around 350,000 in the mid-1990s, and says the number has gone up and down since then. </p><p>Bikers spreading out over the years to new hangouts like Destination Daytona and New Smyrna Beach's Flagler Avenue might be what has some people thinking the number of riders is down. They could just be more scattered, some argue. </p><p>Many agree the ailing economy has kept a good number of bikers at home, and Fine's research into Daytona Beach area hotel occupancy during Bike Week shows visitors have been gradually coming back for Bike Week the past three years. </p><p>The number of bikers also dipped in the early 1990s when a crackdown on biker problems led to a boycott among riders who became convinced Daytona wasn't going to be friendly to them, Fine said. </p><p>"We had to work hard to get them back," Fine said. "This is a multimillion-dollar impact for this community, and jobs depend on it." </p><p>The city needs to make sure Bike Week remains a priority, she maintains. </p><p>"We can not take it for granted," she said. </p><p>Jeff Hentz, president and CEO of the Daytona Beach Area Convention and Visitors Bureau, said he and others will work to keep the event alive. </p><p>"I think it has a lot of shelf life," Hentz said. "My gut feeling is we're not even close to half way there."</p>